[sofixa]

You kind of explained it yourself. You need to run a number of components, keep track of all of them, be able to update them, scale them, make sure they're healthy and restarted when needed, etc. This is of course possible in a number of ways, but not trivial. You're basically describing an orchestrator such as Kubernetes or Nomad. Especially with an already existing Helm chart covering all the deployment logic (what needs to be deployed, how many instances, health checks, etc.): https://github.com/mastodon/chart it's quite an easy choice instead.

[Kwpolska]

Mastodon also has manual install instructions: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/admin/install/

They look fairly simple and typical. Monitoring services could be systemd's job, upgrades would involve apt + bundle + yarn.